Here's a quick primer on some of the terms used in SEO. We offer PowerSites "Lighthouse Marketing" for those tech-savvy agents who want to increase their chances of higher page rankings for their property Websites.
Meta Tags
What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are information inserted into the "head" area of your Web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your Web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a Web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.
The Title Tag
The text you place in the title tag will appear as the name of the browser window when they view the Web page.
The Meta Description Tag
The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the search engine "crawlers" that support the tag.
The Meta Keywords Tag
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy.
What AgencyLogic Does for Your PowerSites
What is a PowerSite? Here're examples of single property Websites agents quickly and easily create with our template-based tool:
Here's a summary of what we do to get new PowerSites crawled by the search engines:
- PowerSite Summary Page - On AgencyLogic.com we have a summary page for each of our live PowerSites. The summary page links directly to the PowerSite home page, details page and the agency information page. These links are a means for the search engines to find and spider your PowerSite.
- AgencyLogic RSS - AgencyLogic also has an RSS feed to promote all the latest PowerSites created by our clients. Once your PowerSite has been activated it's also added to our RSS feed as a news item which will link directly to your PowerSite.
- PowerSite RSS - For each of our clients with two or more active PowerSites there is an RSS feed link at the bottom of each PowerSite page. This RSS feed lists the PowerSites created under the same account as news items further enabling search engines to find and spider your PowerSite.
- Submission to Google and Yahoo - Daily at midnight, each site is submitted for indexing.
Having the search engines spider your site is the first step in getting your PowerSite to show up in search results. Content is crucial to good search engine placement. PowerSites with a one or two line description are generally not as successful as PowerSites where the agent has taken the time to write a full and detailed description of the property they are selling.
What You Can Do with PowerSites
Here's a summary of what you can do to get your PowerSites noticed:
1. Use the URL everywhere. Some of our clients use only the URL in newspaper ads. The savings they see as a result of having far less characters in the copy always amounts to far more than the cost of the PowerSite in the first place. Given that a print ad will often run multiple times we see our clients saving hundreds of dollars a month using this method.
2. Use a sign rider with the URL. This not only gets drive-by buyers interested it also gets potential sellers noticing the extra step you take in selling a home.
3. Add the link to the PowerSite to your own Web site. As mentioned above, this has considerable search engine benefits.
4. Add the URL to all existing marketing documents.
5. List your PowerSite in as many visible places on the web as you can - many of our PowerSite referrals come from http://www.craigslist.org/. Craig's List features a property section where anybody can list their property for sale. Adding a posting to Craig's List will help increase the visibility of your PowerSite.
6. PowerSite showcase - AgencyLogic provides a free PowerSite showcase tool to display a link to all your PowerSites directly from your own Web site. You can access this by logging into your PowerSite account and selecting "PowerSite Showcase".
7. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - Search engines rate the relevancy of your Web site using a number of different factors. The main factor is content. The next biggest factor is inbound links (i.e. how many different Web sites link directly to your own) The more PowerSites you have the more inbound links you will have as each page of your PowerSite links directly to your own Web site.
Misleading Count - "Hits" on a Web Page
When agents review the traffic reports on their PowerSites, we are often asked what is a "hit." This is a perilous topic as there is a misunderstanding of what a "hit" is.
Each graphic on a Web page is a single file and the page itself is a file. As a result whenever someone looks at a page with, for example, 10 graphics on it they actually download 11 files - the ten graphic files and the page itself. This is recorded as 11 hits. Most Web pages have considerably more than 10 graphics - the AgencyLogic home page references over 50 graphics. As the person looks through multiple pages on a graphically intensive Web site (like a PowerSite) they can easily clock up thousands of hits during a single visit. As a result when people tell you "I get 200,000 hits on my Web site" they really have no idea how many people that represents. It could be a few dozen which is far less impressive but more accurate. The most important numbers are "user sessions" and "page views" - these numbers tend to be much lower but far more useful in gauging how many people look at your Web site and what they look at.
And do look at the "referring domains" in our traffic reports to measure any Internet advertising you do. Many agents see traffic coming from their Realtor.com virtual tour link that we uploaded their PowerSite to. Or you can see if it came up in a search engine.
Hope this helps! We want to help you have easy entree to the Internet and to answer all that buyer's are looking for online during their property search.
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